sigh

and in my helplessnes, a surrender that was not the least bit intent. i pray for a deafening silence to hush the turmoil that spills beyond the barrier of my skin. tears... fall into nothingness. beautiful no more when it meets the cold of the ground. beauty seeped within seconds, back to sad nonexistence... tears never did soothe the pregnant idea of an empty rage that tears at my defenses. and although i falter, i don't have to fall. but although the bruises that i feel will heal, turn away in respect, eyes that know nothing but damnation at my vulnerability. i am but human. i am but, a sad imitation of the gods. i am but, a sorry caricature of the perfection you house in your mind...

i hope i wear my nakedness well...

Neruda's Sonnet XVII

CUD

why do i love you? i do not know exactly... i can not specify when or where or how. but it's as if i knew (as to the course of how i knew, it eludes me) when i saw you. it's as if i had a memory of you even before i saw your face or heard your name. by the time we locked eyes, i already knew your scent (nutmeg peach). i already knew the feel of you... down to the salt of your skin. my fingers catch sparks at the mere thought of touching you. there is no shame. no apologies... there are never those for loving you. ahhhh. the mystery of our rhythm...

i love you 10, 100, a million times more than i can probably express. all i know is this (and only this) : my love for you is absolute. never half-way. never one foot outside the door. never selfish but neither acquiescent. never trusting not to hurt but neither untrusting not to mend. never trusting not to fall out of love but neither untrusting not to love. never trusting in settling for anything less than this.

pardon my wordlessness.. you are much to prodigious (and god-classly so..) for my rhetorics.

Sonnet XVII

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz
Or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I LOVE YOU AS CERTAIN DARK THINGS ARE TO BE LOVED,
In secret, BETWEEN THE SHADOW AND THE SOUL.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
But carries in itself the light of hidden flowers
Thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
Risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you WITHOUT KNOWING how, or when, or from where.
I love you straight-forwardly, WITHOUT COMPLEXITIES OR PRIDE;
So I LOVE YOU BECAUSE I KNOW NO OTHER WAY THAN THIS.
Where I do not exist, nor you.
So close that your hand on my chest is my hand.
So close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

9:15

to alleviate my bouts of insomia, i find that i have to indulge my wanderlust... lately i have been having a rather intimate affair with the road. the destination of course being not so much of a concern as the feeling of flight itself. i long for anonymity.. what better way to achive it than to eradicate my my face, my thoughts, my whole self in a sea of faces and be empty myself?

i have been hanging around a certain starbucks branch somewhere in the south. in hopes that the aroma of coffee and dim lights conspire to deliver a certain someone into view. everytime i stay for 3 hours (a glaring idiosyncracy of my wanderlust) regardless of whether i have something more important to do at home or not. If he is Sacrifice personified then i am Guilt with no possibility of redress. i stare at my cafe mocha or mocha frap (order depends on my mood) in my depression. as the starbucks logo starts to haze, my original desperation wanes, loses its strenth and soon, all that is left is melancholy. and as time ticks closer to my 3 hour quota, i find my melancholy grow more and more beautiful. i have spent 3 years of my life with someone i wish unnamed and as i sit facing three empty chairs and my lonely cup, i realize that the stated years are more attractive in retrospect than they were when i was living them. now, what was tiring has left, and only beauty remained.

time ticks closer to 9:15... soon i'll be heading home again. my journey always in vain.

moonshine eternal #1

here finally, i have found the home of my dreams... not only wealth, but escape and enchantment. the night has so merciless an unblinking gaze for so beautiful an eye. my romance with night is absolute. in the stillness, i feel alive. a nocturnal blossom in bloom... held spellbound by the moonlight.

yosh!!!!

turning sadness into kindness
your uniqueness into strength
believing that you should be able to do it
again and again

- sweetest goodbye -

After a 14-month grudge, I decided to live. I decided to live despite what I knew the world had to offer to me...because I knew somehow, that living in an imperfect world is worth it. And so I dared to rise up from the flames of my demise and start living once again. Here is a letter I wrote to someone I wish to remain unnamed:

A decision has been long overdue and procrastination has overstayed its welcome. One can not live in the past, one can not live on a selection of fleeting moments that bleed you dry. It is logic that galvanizes me to motion, to destroy an empty rage sired by a lie and impregnated by a ghost in a shell. Incubus. How cruel life’s humor is to make the shoe fit.

I do not want us to part with grudges against each other but I do not want us to be friends either. There is more to tragedy than hurtful words, more to tragedy than the rhetoric of silence. There are wounds that are beyond healing- surely by now you agree with me that panaceas are nothing but myth. There are happenstances that eat your soul.

I let in the possibility of a relationship between us, not of an ordinary and a merely circumstantial kind, but something deeper and more intimate, though I knew it could hurt me- and throughout the time tended to pre-empt it with my secret pain for that very possibility of pain—I say admittedly. Further in the obscurity (if not mystery) of our relationship is the uncertainty, not the natural kind for a relationship, but of a misplacement caused by the reality of technicalities—that is the only (if not the usual) anchor of realities to the ‘bigger reality.’ Again for so many times, I felt lost. I did not know where to put myself. I did not know where in the map of truth was I to place myself. I had nothing unbiased to hold on, but to the very thing you are shunning—the handle of technicality. My feelings had nothing to hold on. I had no other choice. But, despite its absence, I gave in to chance. And I waited. Even if I knew that I could never lose something (or more appropriately in this case, someone) that was never mine in the first place. Never in the sense that truly mattered. How could I, when I was unjustly robbed even of that?

It was true and you were annoyed — and it might have discouraged you —when I told you that you could not have two things at once. Didn’t I tell you that if you want to hold on to one thing, the only possibility for you to grasp it is to let go of something else? I never wanted to be the bearer of bad news, but I guess the situation called me to be the carrier of sense to someone who shielded himself with supposed ignorance and indecision, be it ignorance and indecision to time, to circumstance or to hurts - heaven forbid you be faced with a situation that demands instantaneous cost-benefit analysis. Your speech and act -they said it all. They gave word to the things that you did not want to say simply because you chose not to. Choosing not to choose in the excuse of indecision when the situation desperately calls for a decision is in itself a choice, is it not? Even if it was a choice to abdicate a great responsibility and leave the situation vulnerable to a nonexistent fate. Have you not noticed that we are condemned to choose? For it is a piece of our existence’s reality – to face the inescapable choices that we are saddled with, with or without our consent. We may not have chosen to be burdened with a particular choice, but we nevertheless have to make a choice. There is no reality except in action - or in some cases, the lack of it.

I did not trust you not because I doubted your sincerity, but because of your very sincerity to your emotions. You give in to everything that you feel, however strong or weak, however long or short-lived. I understood it because I too am guilty of the same crime. And I wondered, if to you I was real or as ether—just another part of your dreams, the ones that you keep at arms length. For this, I did not even know if you saw me then, really saw me as me.

If you say that you did not dream your emotions that time, I would understand you. You cannot possibly dream what you feel, feelings are felt for their degree of reality (relative of course, to one’s paradigm of reality) and persistence (in the sense that there is no false emotions)—and I know the truth of this. But for somebody who grew up around people whose very emotions, real and persistent, betray and hurt the ones closest to them—the emotion that one day loved and ever after rejected the same object, a person of emotions is a willing slave to his emotions, and can be loyal only to his emotions. Never can I trust emotions not to hurt, and inevitably the person steered by it.

I do not wish undone the things that have come to pass. Whether I am better off or not, I can not say with certainty. And it is best if I do not indulge in thoughts that are to my perception, flimsy. There is no point in lingering on the what-ifs, the shoulda-woulda-couldas for the detail that any argument that I could come up in its grounds would be a point that is blatantly contrary to fact. The only thing I am certain of is that I was changed. Do not pity me, it is much too late for that. I can do without it for I am a person who does not sway with sympathy. But just because I do believe in the injustice of that form of coercion (I prefer to be more objective), do not ever wipe out the possibility that I can contend without. I simply chose to argue without- even if the shit already hit the fan, when reasoning with sympathy would have been the most effective means to point out a fallacy in your constructed argument.

I believed in our attraction to each other, that is, in our meeting and togetherness, so I chose to engage in the relationship in spite of its unacceptability by technicalities and rules. Admittedly, I played frivolous at first (I knew you saw this)—I did not know to what I was reciprocating, and to frolic was the safest, most probable assumption (and it may be true that the ‘romance’ started as a play). You were the first to put in romance, I just had to let it happen even if it was only for frivolity. This was part of my unconventionality. But as more time, gestures and emotions were given in, as little by little I could not help it, parts of me were revealed to you, I had only to be serious—I was beginning to share parts of myself to you transgressing my privacy and independence to my unease. For me, it was a form of surrender. But still I did not know to whom and to what. Come to think of it, it is a shame that it had to be thus.

The blow was not at all soft. There was nothing in me to cushion it even if I had lived with the possibility of inevitable pain or the hovering threat of it, whether it be me or someone else who would bear it. And I guess, it was better that I had to be the one deemed less even if it was for the wrong reasons, even if it was because of faulty argument. Blame it on bad synapse feeding immediate sensory perception into faculty of reason. I am not rationalizing. Although it disagrees with being a cynic and a critic at birth, take me as someone who does not rationalize, at least one who didn’t during the composition of this letter.

In truth, I could not understand your perception, at the same time I doubted your truthfulness. How could one deny the truth from someone and be convinced that it was out of care? How could you say you care for someone and refuse that someone something we all know she should know? Then you told me you love me. I thought it was a joke. I did not know to whom you were lying. To XXX, to me, or to yourself-in all sincerity I think it was the latter. How can I trust my well-being to somebody who cares enough for somebody to lie to her, and who loves somebody enough not to give her peace of mind at least? Do you see my point or do you refuse to see it like the many moments you refused to see? When I told you in the movie theatre that I could not go through with things given the current situation, I was not merely asking for reassurance, I was asking for a part of the truth. The truth at least, of our intentions for each other- of your intentions for me. How could I look at it in any other way? I am sure that you are literate enough to read between the lines. But you did not give me that. Simply because you refused not to. But I waited still in my distress. I thought it was too harsh to demand from you something you could not give — as of the moment. I guess I was wrong to even think that. I should have known better. I guess love makes fools of us all.

History, by its intrinsic nature, is always a one sided account. And with grace borne of understanding, I willfully submit to its injustices. She will know me as a thief, as a wrecker of relationships as she so frantically puts it, for eternity – an eternity whose endurance of which weighs on your shoulder. An eternity that I speculate you will bear. Language will leave me with silence. Gravid with eloquence and possibilities as it may be, it will be silence nonetheless.

The time of my contemplation about certain truths has come and gone. I am now moved to seek my own bliss. And so, I ask this of you, an entity to negate what you told her at Eastwood’s Tower: closure. Not just any closure. But the full length of its truth, or more appropriately, your part of it. I am not good with ad baculum nor with ad hominem. As an acquaintance, a friend or however you see me fit to be with regard to you, give me at least this. I have never asked you for something this grave and it is my ignominy that I should ask this of you. But your truth in our little encounter is imperative to my better health, not to mention crucial in the judgment of a circumstance I am faced with.

P.S.
Night’s passion, with its nocturnal residents enlighten me that god must exist.(albeit not the one Christianity shoves down our throats…)
My faculty of reason tells me that I will never understand it/her/him.
My heart whispers that I was not designed to.

PPA - the series

it's been too long since i last saw you. too long since i felt the warmth of your skin. since i last saw you smile. since you last made me smile... four years ago, we knew nothing of each other. and now, we know nothing of each other again. the world does not stop for my grief. and it urges me not to stop either. then, i drew comfort in knowing that we sleep beneath the same canopy of stars. now, there is nothing but the void of the night. then, the night held such promise...now, it holds nothing but bouts of insomia that last until 5 in the morning. in my surrender, i swallow a bitter pill or two and drug myself to sleep, knowing that tomorrow will hold no special sunrise. it is the same empty existence day after day. this is the only real time that i wish for death's scythe. for i know now that it is the only sweet repose i may be allowed. for even in slumber you haunt me. in my sleep is perhaps the closest i could come to you now. if i only have a stong cause, a good unselfish cause to make me work again... that would indeed be mercy.

if there really is only one person for us, then i know now that i have lost him despite my denial.

MY IMMORTAL
Evanescence


i'm so tired of being here
suppressed by all of my childish fears
and if you have to leave
i wish that you would just leave
because your presence still lingers here
and it won't leave me alone

you used to captivate me
by your resonating light
but now i'm bound by the life you left behind
your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams
your voice it chased away all the sanity in me

these wounds won't seem to heal
this pain is just too real
there's just too much that time cannot erase
when you cried i'd wipe away all of your tears
when you'd scream i'd fight away all of your fears
and i've held your hand through all of these years
but you still have all of me

i've tried so hard to tell myself that you're gone
and though you're still with me
i've been alone all along

bottling all my hopes in a store-bought scent

there are some things in me that are plainly ineffable. my principles, my opinions and my truths among them. and yet, i have always prided myself with the fact that describing things is what i do best. events to words. moments to words. even words to even better words. it's a glaring cliche, but i'm a writer (the rationale of an excessively and overly articulate, literary life) and being such entails that nothing should lie beyond the scope of my descriptive capacity.

but i find that there are things that can only be felt. there are things that exist and remain eternal even without proof. there is an irrevocable cognizance whose veracity lies with the gravity of its sentience - an entity beyond even the nomenclatural capsule of science! it's just like what the fox said in Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince... what is essential is invisible to the eye. because we know these to be true even without evidence that science calls real.

and these things that i sense only with intuition, these things that psychologically hasten my heart to the point of defense mechanism's conversion, these moving truths that leave phantom pains when met with my ignorance and arrogance... these i know to be true for they undoubtedly change me (however minute and however invisible to the sight of others). and change always implies a reaction. my reaction to powerful things that i can not give form with words. i find that there is just too much of these things when i feel them that giving them word is an impossibility. for try as i might, there will always be aromas that i can not write with such promise, colors whose hue i could not write with such boldness, and motion that i can not write with such animation. never can i write such an ambiance that presents such awe. and so, i choose not to desecrate such perfection and beauty with my lacking.

if in my arrogance, i defy my faculty of reason and try to capture it with my eloquence, always, there will be something missing... how deep the shadow was in the drama of light and shade i witnessed it, how the moment i found myself in shifted from inconsequential happenstance to serendipity and then to crystal clear clarity... these things will never be in the letters that give shape to my words. they elude the loops of my a's, e's and o's. they lie in the blanks of my whitespaces. they lie in the void that give shape to my paragraphs.

and so i chose to give word to these things, my simple truths, not with the stroke of ink on paper but with a mark that holds much more authority... a simple implication of its reality and its veracity.

room mate

"Some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's goint to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity!"

That's the text message my room mate unexpectedly sent me one morning. Groggy from sleep and battling an imminent hangover, I managed to key in a few poetics of my own. Unable to fall back to sleep, wicked sandman has left me to the daylight yet again, I lie in bed for a while trying to orient myself to the day at hand. I linger on the subject of friendship and dally. I see the concept in slow motion, like the contained colors suspended and gracefully undulating in a lava lamp ...I admit shamelessly that I have only a few people I can call my friends. But I keep them close. How good things are do not lie on quantity anyway but the veracity of the relationship itself.

My roommate and I are both Libras. Which is probably why we either talk our our throats dry or we never speak a word at all during our 'chance' encounters. Well alright, not really chance encouters per se' but chance encounters in the sense that they are the encounters that my roommate and I wish to galvanize. She and I always have a protocol (as to the origin of the protocol, I have no clue). And handshaking of sorts to verify if one wishes to engage in an encounter. An on-the-fly hello, a wordless offer of fridge crumbs and colas. It is in these few seconds where the beauty of our friendship lie. For these few moments are devoid of expectation and devoid of malice. How the invitation is met has no merit in our friendship. Whether it be met with welcome, a polite decline or even an occasional cold shoulder, it never mattered. Warm welcomes are usually followed by verbal spars, heated arguments and eventually sheepish grins. At the end of it all, it boils down to respect. Enough to say your end of the continuum and enough not to push it. Enough to listen and consider. Enough to consider otherwise.

During times of disinterest for interaction, the encounter is patiently delayed without a trace of resentment. OK, perhaps a split second grudge but nothing more. Privacy is utmost and we never pry unless beckoned. Regardless of the reception, the essence of our ineffable relationship endures. I always reckoned that there is more to friendship than words...that people can communicate just as articulately and eloquently with silence. That action has as many tones, diction and idioms as utterances. And we have both proven that being taciturn from disposition has its values... as one who is innately taciturn may now and then make an effort at sensible, substantial conversation - a relief and a luxury in a world filled with spindoctors.

There is another thing that I find wonderfully unsual and cordial with our relationship. 'Delicious ambiguity' as she so eloquently put it. The strap from our tether unwinds. We have each other without staking any real claim. For we are accountable to each other only to the extent that we want to be. Give and take without the complexities and guilt. NO! Purely giving and taking to one's discretion - as one's objective intellect sees fit, a process borne not in disregard to morality but a reference to the innate benevolence (good and evil is a pregnant idea that has its entrapments to the unwary) one feels once affection is established. A certain loyalty that is won only by the attraction one feels when one sees the real person. An attraction that comes after seeing the vulnerability of someone and the decision not to dominate or malign. Having without owning.

Kudos to Cathy! A trusted confidant and friend. For seeing past our tantrums and mood swings. For seeing beyond my defenses and the giving me the grace of privacy without my asking. Here's to the bliss of anticipating the uncertain. Here's to more verbal spars and glib quips that provide relief to the toils of day. Here's to more dialogues and further contemplation on the woes of life that make it worth living. You always knew that I was the face that drowns day with the hope of night. ^_^

thesis paroxysms

thesis. it must be the bane of every CE student's life. especially if you chose to specialize in robotics! sux. i remember nervous flicks on the lighter, grinding teeths, glares, fights and the eventual triumph. those were the days when i was running on empty.

now that it's over with a nice silver mota, i have to say i'm being a fool for admitting it but there will be things that i will miss like hell about thesis.

1. the a/c that threatened to freeze us all to death. either that or kill someone with it's spit. especially pugo, angel and bok whose tables were unfortunately within its range.

2. the stupidity of kia. for slipping time and again on the a/c's pool of spit. 'ang dulas! ang dulas!' you never learn do you?

3. a makeshift bed of the lab's chairs. you don't care anymore when you're that weary.

4. the "dread lord's" aura. god. seeing your face never fails to ruin my day.

5. gossip that pops up whenever a thesis group reaches a 'dead end.'

6. tori's wailing. ahh.. err... singing.

7. monopoly and scrabout. any takers?

8. naruto fridays and anime marathons. why is it that everytime it's friday, people seem to come to the thesis lab an hour earlier than the usual 8 o' clock? nani!!!! anousa-anousa! baka. gambare naruto-kun!

9. illegal lan games: tft, starcraft & diablo. finally. we found good use for the school's resources. thanks to kyle for being our look out.

10. lunch. here's to the perky lady's vm meals and manang's tapsilog. (god save me from hepa)

11. the demons that frolic. kyle, lucifer by survey. and monch. here's to 'healthy' discussions devoid of pretense. to matching meals and the daily sprite litre.

12. damn good company. monch. momo. pokimonch. duo-sama. momo-sama. who would have thought that you had the ability to make me laugh? XD

and of course...

13. DARIHL our thesis. 'you goddamn robot! walk damn you! walk!' seeing you grow up to become who you are now... it's fulfilling and i find myself having a case of mommy syndrome despite great reluctance. here's to whatever relationship we had.. s-m (you being the sadist of course...) or love-hate. come to mommy!

god. i never thought i'd hear myself say this. but not knowing that i shall never again be a part of these things leaves me with phantom pains. i find myself wishing that we could have made things last a bit longer... here's to the hope that life's malice will entwine our paths again in some indistinct future. until our unlikely reunion, keep safe.

make yourself - incubus

my sentiments exactly... flowing from the mouth of brandon boyd and from the musical stylings of incubus...

If I hadn’t made me, I would’ve been made somehow
If I hadn’t assembled myself, I’d have fallen apart by now
If I hadn’t made me, I’d be more inclined to bow
Powers that be, would have swallowed me up
But that’s more than I can allow
Bow, aww yeah
If you let them make you, they’ll make you paper mache
At a distance you’re strong, until the wind comes
Then you crumble and blow away
If you let them fuck you, there will be no fore-play
Rest assured, they’ll screw you complete
Til your ass is blue and gray
You should make amends with you
If only for better health, better health
But if you really want to live
Why not try, and make yourself
Make yourself
Make yourself
If I hadn’t made me, I’d have fallen apart by now
I won’t let them make me, it’s more than I can allow
So when I make me, I won’t be paper mache
And if I fuck me, I’ll fuck me my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Pow, fuck me in my own way
Fuck me in my own way
You should make amends with you
If only for better health, better health
But if you really want to live
Why not try, and make yourself
Make yourself

thanks to http://www.lyricsfreak.com for the lyrics.

walking on broken glass

Memory is a selection of images, some clear, others illusive, some engraved deeply within the abysmal recesses of our minds. Each image is a strand and each strand is an essential part of the tapestry of life. What makes this bitter reality of existence worth its while is the fact that we all hold a piece of the truth. It may come as a surprise to some but even the ignorant, the dumb and the broken have their stories to tell. Bitter reality never was exclusively selective and truth resides both in silence and in speech.

I have come to know in the span of nineteen years that the concept of a single and definite truth is nothing but a three-fold Utopian dream. Being that, it would be beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for impossible to even try to hint its likelihood as my truth and my reality may not be the same for everyone else. A simple but glaring illustration is the subject of religion and its immortal controversies. A spin-off of Catholicism, the Church of Christ (Iglesia ni Cristo) denies the deity of Christ while Roman Catholics believe in the mystery that Christ is both human and divine. Each facet have their own beliefs and they both hold them to be their truths. If you were a member of the Church of Christ, it is your truth that Christ is not divine and your truth would be the opposite if you were a Roman Catholic. Whose truth therefore, is the real truth? Is it the former or the latter's? Dare I even say both? There is absolutely no sense in accepting both arguments to be the Truth obviously because the ideas are in opposition. Is it safe therefore to assume that Truth is relative?

Even science with all its observations, identifications, descriptions, experimental investigations, and theoretical explanantions of phenomena, is not immune from the multifaceted spectrum of truth. About seven thousand years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. Now, we all know that it's not true. It was true then, when man's model of the universe was geocentric in nature as proposed by Aristotle an Ptolemy but the case isn't presently so. When Copernicus came up with his heliocentric hypothesis, the masses rejected its veracity because if first of all did not fit into the Aristotelian way of thinking and it also challenged the long-standing belief that the earth was the heavenly center of the universe placed by god himself.

So my contention is, anyone can change the truth, with doubt, with blood, with death, with an intense struggle or by whatever means anyone sees fit to galvanize its evolution because the reality of truth is that it is not only relative, it is also flexible (now we know why there are so many spindoctors in the world) and usually redefined to suit one's necessity. There must be honesty therefore, in the statement that the only thing constant in this world is change... and that statement includes Truth within its scope.

What therefore really matters you might ask... well, at this point, there is no justice in saying that the Truth matters. What matters is your own truth, or more accurately put, your own version of the truth as you see and experience it to be. What matters is the veracity of your truth. What is important is the strenght of your conviction in your truth that it helps other people find their truth as well.

Politics and Governance

This was originally a paper I wrote on politics as required by Mr. Louie Montemar:

I want to start my paper with a cliché, as most articles, papers and novels are not started off. I have never been one to really engage in or even think about politics or politicking for that matter. Allow me to clarify that Mr. Montemar has, if I recall correctly, made the argument that politics is something that we could never totally eradicate from our lives, and has suggested the term politicking to articulate the sentiments of many misinformed people – my ignorant and misinformed self included of course. Well Sir, if you think that I have been beating around the bush with my quaint but totally irrelevant opening, you are correct. To tell you the truth, I had to ask a number of people for suggestions as to what a good topic might be. Most proposed topics given to me can be generally classified as current events and I, being one who never got into the habit of reading periodicals even through constant insistence on my part (somehow I never got past the comics section whenever I tried), believed that I could never write a sensible-enough paper about politics - sensible-enough, to merit a grade to suit my purpose that is. The fact of the matter is, I have never had a concrete idea of politics before my POLIGOV subject although I suspect that I already had many first hand experiences of it in my life. The agonizing part is that, thinking that I have almost finished the subject, I would have already recalled these particular moments of my life and identified them with politics. But I do not - and that obviously, is my troublesome ball-and-chain as of the moment.

Moving on from a clumsy start, I would like to give a somewhat informal discussion of politics the way I have haphazardly experienced it in my life. Modest as these haphazard encounters with politics might be compared to most people, I believe that it would serve my purpose in this particular paper. If not, I would always have the consolation that what I have written here is better (forgive me for my arrogance) than the lousy paper a certain Ms. Marquez has submitted to the same professor I am writing this paper for. A word of petition on my part though, please do not share my sentiments with other people in any case as it would only embarrass me nor inform Ms. Marquez of my opinion about her paper.

This card tells the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust…

Anyway, in the summer of two thousand and three, I found myself walking towards a museum whose name caught my fancy – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After minutes of lining up for admission, I was dutifully inspecting a makeshift identification card a museum personnel gave me (she said it was part of the program). I was supposed to be Ilona Karfunkel Kalman, born on May 12, 1906 in Erdobenye, Hungary and that I was gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. That information I thought to myself, sounded somewhat grim. Wouldn’t you agree with me dear Sir?
Of course, important aspects of a discussion are always given definition and to provide just that, let me quote its description from the museum pamphlet. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. During that time, I later on learned, six million Jews were murdered as well as Poles, Roma or gypsies, people with disabilities. They were all targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic and national reasons as they were believed to be a race weaker than that of Hitler’s Aryan race. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. And I was offered a glimpse of this horror as I saw videos, pictures and materials that spoke of the said oppression. One section of the exhibit that engraved itself in my mind was a section where a room (to give a descriptive estimate, half the size of Gokongwei rooms) was full of mounds and mounds of shoes. They were all grey with ash and looked beaten. On a wall wrote (or something like it anyway) we are the witnesses of a great injustice as our owners were thrown into the flame. We could survive the fire, their flesh however, could not.

I remember that I could not even begin to describe what it was that I felt upon reading those words as I stood there fully alive with my trusty Kickers on. Suffice to say that the emotions I felt during that moment are beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for melancholy. Call it a reaction. An affective orientation if you wish to be politically correct.

For the dead and the living we must bear witness…(Ellie Weisel)

The deaths, the massacre and the injustice, all these stemmed from one political ideology – fascism. And fascism as we know it has a face, that of Adolf Hitler’s. The Holocaust as I see it was an inhumane exercise of power and authority in the name of one political ideology – the unity and harmony of government and society defined by opposition to forces that might weaken that collective unity (Danziger). Fascism is a philosophy that would give rapid development to a country. Fascism as displayed by Hitler however, was an idea poisoned and corrupted by personal loathing which he crafted and spilled amongst the German people.
Put it this way, Fascism had great ideological promise I’d give it that but perhaps the way the ideology was interpreted and the means of execution for reaching fascism’s political goals were just too costly and in the strictest argument, bible-sense wrong. No such aggregate of people should suffer in account of any ideology be it political, economic or social in nature. We do not need any form of education to know that. Politics I believe should only be a mechanism for enhancing the people but the reality is, it is a double-edged sword like many other things.

outside looking in

Man is probably the only creature who has precariously deviated from his instinct and perhaps the only creature who sought to redefine himself in his unfounded arrogance - which is probably equally why he is considered the most interesting. It’s peculiar to admit that man is such a good study taking into consideration that we ourselves are human. Perhaps it is even our very flare for drama that fuels this narcissistic idiosyncracy of sorts, this fascination of the self.

We do not know of the strength and the purpose that lies behind the existence of man (this is of course, open to refute). Procreation? Stewardship perhaps? But we know this much is true: that man has constructed worlds upon worlds of ideas to suit his every necessity. For the purposive he has invented meaning, for the devout he has fashioned a host of deities, even the cynical he indulges with pessimism. To go on and on about each and every school of thought that caters to a particular makeshift requirement would be tediously unnecessary. What I am driving at as of the moment is that perhaps these seemingly innocuous concepts are an unconscious expression of man’s vexation at the sight of reality- an argument that is to my frame of mind, rather justified. Consider this premise if you do not completely see my case: who else has a greater reason to lie his way out of reality if not man? If we do not lie to ourselves and strip reality bare, then I personally think that we would be left without any drive to live. If man is truly the crown of all creation as argued by many philosophers, then it goes without saying that in man’s semi-perfection, he is capable of creating a scapegoat of the mind. Virtual as it may be, it is still nonetheless- the makeshift backdoor that man has created to protect both his sanity and his vanity. As to whether I am right side up or upside down, I leave the decision to your objective intellect. Before you define anything that is close to a decision however, whether it is for or against my veracity, keep in mind that I have perhaps come in the guise of a pill – whatever you reckon fitting to help you swallow truth all the more easily.

At scrutiny’s fingertips, doesn’t it seem as if all the fragments of man’s delusions have warped itself to a kind of entity, a thing we have fondly called reality that is in truth, beyond even the pale of man’s descriptive capacity for rhyme and reason. Should it be man’s consolation therefore, that the answers reality gives to those who search for purpose and meaning are never really what they expect them to be? Should man therefore dare to raise his fist and in his frustration, shake it towards a conceived heaven and against a conceived holy host of deities and heavenly beings? Should he dare to make up his own truths and another kind of reality that is none too far from the reality he knows as he stumbles along the way? For what is it really that shapes man’s reality if not pieces of himself that he broke, mended back and shattered again? Man is a being whose existence is under perpetual redefinition. Was it not he who was whole who allowed himself to be broken by the careless, the indifferent, the enraged? This is perhaps a glorious moment for our subject, a moment of seemingly utter selflessness which is not always the case in ordinary instances. Are these the moments that man feels that truly alive? Is this then, the reality of all realities?

It is rather unfortunate that man’s nature and conceit never did allow him to be broken for long. It is ill-fated that his intelligence, the very thing that makes him exceed among the creatures of this world, never did bid him to sleep beside an empty rage. For all that man knows, it might have been worth his while… His nature and conceit spurred him to pick himself up piece by piece; it galvanized him to pick up his dignity, his lopsided beauty, his humanity (even if it is a humanity that he discards willingly to give room to reason) and all the things that he allowed to be mutilated by the careless, the jealous, and the envious. It was all the things he allowed himself to maim. In man’s rejuvination, he is subject to a thousand pair of eyes that smolder their jealousy, because man is a phoenix in his own right. He dares to rise up from his ashes, and this perhaps, is the irony of it all. In his rebirth, he goes back to a reality that veils what is real. Should I dare and say that reality as we know it is a surreal reality woven by somnambulist society? That all this is nothing but a Technicolor dream thought of by black and white people?